Gators' coach has 43-year wait between B.C. high school basketball championships

At the conclusion of Super Bowl III, New York Jets’ quarterback Joe Namath ran off the field with a raised index finger proclaiming “We’re No. 1” -- and an iconic image was born.

The universal symbol for validation of a championship season really didn’t take hold, however, until the invention of the foam finger — and that came a few years after George Bergen won a B.C. high school boys basketball championship with the Mennonite Educational Institute Eagles (Abbotsford) in 1970.

Forty-three years later, Bergen, now coach of the Walnut Grove Gators of Langley, posed with his jubilant players for a group photo following their 59-53 win Saturday over the White Rock Christian Academy Warriors at the Langley Events Centre.

For the teenage Gators, the ritualized “We’re No. 1” symbol was a reflexive gesture, as natural as breathing, even though the victory represented the Langley school’s first provincial title at the highest level of boys’ basketball — triple-A.

Yet Bergen, who played in an era of short shorts and long hair, was much slower on the uptake, as if the brashness in declaring “No. 1” was somehow a novel and awkward concept that still takes some getting used to.

After all, he had worked through parts of five decades before tasting prep hoops’ highest honour again.

“As a player (in 1970) it was a fabulous feeling,” Bergen acknowledged. “But this is good, probably a little sweeter. To see a bunch of young men so determined to fulfil what they needed to do, so willing to learn and so willing to be teammates, you can’t beat that.”

There is gruff, old-school quality to Bergen that recalls coach Norman Dale (played by Gene Hackman) in the movie Hoosiers, the true-life story of a small-town team in rural Indiana that won the state championship in 1954.

While the comparison may seem all too convenient and clichéd — Walnut Grove is a suburban high school, and there were no parents coming after Bergen with raised pitchforks to protest his coaching style, unlike the movie — the Gators’ assistant coach, Jared Bergen, said it really isn’t too much of a stretch.

“The amount of times he’s quoted Hoosiers in the locker-room ...” explained the head coach’s son. “Every year, when we come here (provincial tournament), he tells the boys to go out and measure the basketball hoop. ‘It’s 10 feet high. The free-throw line is the same distance away as it is in our gym.’ That’s his favourite line.”

It’s a bromide that Coach Dale uses in the movie, to ready his players from being overwhelmed in the big-time Butler field house, where the championship game was played. “I think you will find this has the exact same measurements as back in Hickory,” he said.

As part of a post-game awards ceremony, George Bergen was handed the Rodger Morrow Championship Coach Award which goes to the winning coach in the title game. Appropriately enough, the man doing the presenting was Steve Hanson, the head coach of the Terry Fox Ravens whose team edged the Gators 75-74 in last year’s final on a 10-foot jump shot with three seconds left.

“I don’t think it could get much sweeter for Walnut Grove,” Hanson said. “They were in the same situation against White Rock, up by eight or nine points (the Gators led 53-44) in the fourth quarter, as they were last year against us. This time, they held on to win. Sometimes, going through those moments makes you more resilient. And I think it did for this group.”

Hanson, who describes himself as “a very good friend” of the Walnut Grove coach, said Bergen’s image — the rugged and noble features, the commanding voice, the primordial passion and commitment — betrays no false impression of who he is.

“He coaches the way he played — he’s a tough guy,” Hanson explained. “He likes to keep things simple. And he’s all about work ethic. He’s my type of coach. He’s a teddy bear inside, but he expects his players to practise and play hard — and they do.”

Developing a winning basketball culture takes time, however, and nobody can say Bergen hasn’t paid his dues. He was there at the ground floor, in 1991-92, when the Langley school came into being and only four players answered the initial casting call for basketball.

“We couldn’t field a team,” recalled Bergen. “Eventually, we got seven to play. We won four and lost 29. The Fraser Valley is the toughest conference in the province.”

Indeed. Walnut Grove’s first appearance in the B.C. tournament didn’t come until 2000, when the Gators finished a surprising fourth, their high-water mark in the provincials until last year when they fell one bucket short of the Ravens in the final.

“When I was in Grade 8 I thought he was the scariest guy in the school,” said Grade 12 forward Paul Getz of Bergen. “My perception changed when I got to know him. He’s willing to do anything to help us get better. He always puts the team before himself. He’s put so much into it. It’s his life.”

Getz said all the Gators were aware that their head coach was just a kid, turning 18, like many of them, in the year Bergen last went through the championship experience before Saturday.

“We were so close last year,” Getz said. “That’s why winning this year meant so much more. And we know how special it was for him.”

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Gators' coach has 43-year wait between B.C. high school basketball championships

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